Not by strength but by pliancy of character he accomplished the transition from the mediaeval to the modern epoch of Catholicism.

He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to steer the ship of the Church clear through innumerable perils.

This scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his successors in S.Peter's chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations.
Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII.

was shut up in S.
Angelo, it seemed as though the Papal power might be abolished.
Forty-five years after his death, Sarpi, writing to a friend in 1610, expressed his firm opinion that the one, the burning question for Europe was the Papal power.[50] Through him, poor product as he was of ordinary Italian circumstances, elected to be Pope because of his easy-going mildness by prelates worn to death in fiery Caraffa's reign, it happened that the flood of Catholic reaction was rolled over Europe.

In a certain sense we may therefore regard him as a veritable _Flagellum Dei_, wielded by inscrutable fate.